Reflections on Agony and Hope

By Curt Prendergast

Reflections on Agony and Hope

As chief of TIME's London Bureau, Correspondent Curt Prendergast has been reporting on the agony of Northern Ireland for more than four years. Last week he sent the following personal assessment of a brutal war that seems to have no end:

BY now the Ulster problem probably bores the world. It certainly exasperates the British. Senator Edward Kennedy notwithstanding, there is no imperial nostalgia left in England for this patch of Ireland-most Britons wish it would simply go away. So, too. do many Southern Irish. As a Dublin voter once said to Irish Politician Conor Cruise O'Brien: "Northern Ireland! I wish someone would saw that place off."

Yet what happens daily in Ulster would bring about a state of emergency almost immediately in Britain or the Republic of Ireland. Every morning, the BBC's Northern Ireland newscast (which is not heard in Britain) begins with an overnight casualty report-a chilling recitation of bombings, shootings, killings. It ends with the day's diary of local events-choral-society meetings, flower shows, agricultural competitions-all testifying that some normal life does go on, even amidst the violence.

Medieval Fury. But for too many in the province, life can never again be normal. Not for the 11-year-old Londonderry boy, just back from a futile trip to Boston in a quest to regain his eyesight, which was destroyed by one of the British army's six-inch-long rubber antiriot bullets. Not for the 22-year-old Catholic girl maimed on the eve of her wedding when the Irish Republican Army bombed a Belfast restaurant. "Two legs gone, one arm sheared off, an eye lost, all in one young female body," said Dublin's Irish Times. "That equals someone's idea of patriotism in Ireland in 1972." In both Catholic and Protestant areas, isolated families are still pulling out and retreating into the ghettos with their own kind, for safety. The reflex is medieval, but then the fury of this conflict has often been that too.

Through it all, Ulstermen-Protestant and Catholic-remain an incredibly sturdy breed, very warm and hospitable. A reporter develops fondnesses, even for some of the bloodiest of them; the shock is great when a man who has had you in for tea one week is found shot dead the next, his body stuffed into the back of a car. The North is both a sickening and a fascinating place. Nonetheless, there is something appealing about the brutal honesty of its politics, even the ear-scraping Northern accent, at least when compared with the soft-spoken hypocrisy one finds in the South.

The Republic professes to want reunification, but this claim is discounted by displays of indifference, even callousness, toward the plight of Northern Catholics and by insensitivity to the fears of Northern Protestants. The Dubliners really want the North to be given to them free-but not too soon.

Meanwhile, the Irish government | has turned on the I.R.A.'s militant Provisional wing, to which it once gave refiuge. Sean MacStiofain, the Proves' former chief of staff, is in military detention, discredited for having broken his hunger and thirst strike. Martin McGuinness, the Proves' 22-year-old Derry brigade commander who used to receive reporters in the Bogside gasworks (Any regrets for the shootings? "Certainly not," he would snap), has also been arrested. Other captured leaders include a strategist who used to explain, coolly and lucidly, the lessons in terror that the I.R.A. had learned from the guerrillas of Palestine and Cyprus. Undoubtedly, other terrorist movements will now study I.R.A. tactics.

For a long time, the I.R.A. was winning. By 1972 it had bombed the Protestant Unionist Government at Stormont out of existence. Indeed, only seven months ago, the Proves were still, in the words of one Ulster politician, "on the pig's back." They, more than any other group, held the key to peace or war. Britain's Secretary for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, was dealing with them as a major power, flying them to London in an R.A.F. plane for secret political talks. MacStiofain even got the British to release an internee from prison camp to join the I.R.A. delegation. But they blundered by breaking a truce they had arranged themselves. As Bogside Catholic M.P. John Hume put it: "The Provos bombed themselves to the conference table, and then they bombed themselves away again."

Tips. Since then, the I.R.A.'s fortunes have declined dramatically. British troops dominate the former I.R.A. strongholds. Tips on hideouts and arms caches are being whispered anonymously into so-called robot telephones, which are hooked up to tape recorders at police stations. "People are putting the finger on the Proves," says one Belfast Catholic politician. "There are no longer so many houses harboring guns, so the I.R.A. has to put them in the garden, in cellophane bags, and the army's digging them up. There aren't any demonstrations against the Proves, but people show their resistance. The curtain has begun to come down."

Like Irish mythology (of which it is already a part), the I.R.A. never quite dies. Nobody is yet willing to write off its military potential. Indeed, it recently added Soviet rocket launchers to its weaponry. There are also indications that a new generation of I.R.A. terrorists is coming up. A Belfast boy, 14, was arrested recently while teaching a class in bomb making. In fact, more than half those now being arrested for bomb making are under 22. But the I.R.A. may have already lost its war politically, in the sense that it no longer seems capable of influencing the shape of the new constitutional arrangements that Britain will shortly impose on Northern Ireland.

The British plan, to be outlined soon in a White Paper, could make unpleasant reading for extremists on the other side as well. As Whitelaw told me: "We're long past the stage of Protestant domination as a road to peace. That'll never happen." The big question is whether the British plan will be so unacceptable to Protestant militants, such as the Ulster Defense Association, that they will surge into the streets for a showdown with British authority -and, if that happens, how British forces will react to the challenge. The U.D.A., which claims a membership of 54,000 and has a growing arsenal of weapons, could pose a bigger threat than the I.R.A.

The U.D.A.'s militancy characterizes the rising tide of nationalism among Ulster Protestants. The Union Jack is still flown, and curbstones of Belfast's Shankill district remain painted red, white and blue. But more and more narrow doorways are displaying the flag of Ulster, a red cross on a white field, with a red hand upraised in the center. For many Protestants, the British army has become something foreign, and the hostility is mutual. Across barbed-wire peace lines, the soldiers are as likely to mutter about "Protestant bastards" as they do about "Fenian bastards."

One wonders whether a common mistrust of Britain might not eventually unite Ulstermen. In fact, there is already more contact between Protestant and Catholic politicians, even the extremists, than meets the eye. Among those advocating joint exploration of a "negotiated" independence from Britain is John Taylor, onetime Home Minister in the Stormont Cabinet. Taylor was the target of a machine-gun attack by an l.R.A. faction last year. Although still a hard-fisted Unionist, he has recently made discreet approaches to Northern republicans and now enjoys a vogue among Dublin editorialists. Still, the idea of independence, with its implication of British troop withdrawal, gets a frosty reception in London. "Not on." says Whitelaw, his pale blue eyes glinting. Without British troops in Ulster, he observes, "there'd be a holocaust."

Holocaust. Bloodbath. Massacre.

Such doomsday language invariably crops up in discussions about Ulster's future. But the end may not be quite so grim. Sheer battle fatigue may give Northern Ireland the respite it needs.

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